Patrick and I are sitting inches from each other, Indian-style. Criss-cross apple sauce.

“Would you like to go out with me tonight?”

“Yes.”

Patrick and I get to our feet and clean up our mess in the living room from our activities of the day. Patrick puts our wolf masks back in the closet and I make sure all the chicken bones are thrown away.

We get into his minivan and our night begins–not with a scream, but with a whisper.

“Would you like to get some breakfast tacos?” Patrick whispers from the driver seat. He does this sometimes. It’s because of something that happened to him when he was little, but every time he tells me I get bored and zone out, so I can’t really say what it was that messed him up so bad.

“Yea, sure,” I say, one hand stretched across my eyes and facing the passenger window. This is another weird thing Patrick needs because of something that happened to him when he was little. I need to ask him about this.

Turns out Taco Cabana has this awesome deal on breakfast tacos: a dozen breakfast tacos in a box for roughly ten or eleven or twelve bucks. Cheap stuff. We drive around the streets of Denton in Pat’s minivan, high on life and love and youth and nyquil mixed with whiskey.

When we get tired of that, we return to Pat’s to eat the rest of the tacos and watch clips of Good Will Hunting on YouTube. Our favorite is the breakup scene.

“Probably not, Pat,” I say. Pat retreats into his room and from beyond the door are the muffled sounds of weeping and rapping about being sad.

“Should we go out now?” Pat asks, the door swinging open as if he was literally trying to rip it off its hinges.

“Sure,” I say, gently unwinding a length of wire from my throat.

—

The night air seems to be laced with the kind of hopeful exuberance of somebody with diabetes getting their insulin or whatever when they’re dying. [Editor’s Note: Kyle, what’s going on? You can’t say this kind of thing.]

The bar we head to–Lucky Lou’s–has, increasingly the last few months, become covered in douchey half-people. To make this environment more tolerable, me and Patrick buy single after single of Johnny Walker, play giant Jenga, and threaten to make out with each other if the other doesn’t start being nicer. Strangely, no women talk to us.

Dejected, Pat and I amble down Fry Street. We’re ambling to Crooked Crust, where we will ingest enough pizza to mix with the Scotch in our bellies to form a kind of concrete that will fill all the cracks in our hearts that women and life have put there. It’s at this moment, at our lowest, when two young ladies approach us.

I talk to the alpha-female for sometime before realizing that I hate her. I go get a refill. Her sidekick is much more enjoyable. She’s brown and thinks I’m funny and gives me a drink of her drink but I probably shouldn’t have taken a drink because I already had my own and bitch coulda had somethin.